


bear it as our Roman actors do

by Ladybug_21



Category: Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy, Julius Caesar - Donmar Warehouse (2017)
Genre: Character Study, Domestic Violence, Donmar Warehouse, Drug Abuse, Flashbacks, Gen, Homophobia, Plays Within Plays, Prostitution, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Character, Trauma, meta af, prisons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 07:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26968276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: How one play changed the lives of seven inmates; or, character studies of some of the meta roles in the2017 Donmar Warehouse productionof Shakespeare'sJulius Caesar.
Kudos: 3





	1. Mark Antony

**Author's Note:**

> A friend recommended the Donmar Warehouse production of _Julius Caesar_ to me years and years ago, but I've only just watched it; and, since "watched it" here means that I watched it obsessively over and over, this was the somewhat inevitable result. I own no rights to Shakespeare's words nor to Phyllida Lloyd's brilliant theatrical conceit. The title is from Act II, Scene 1 of the play. And Happy Ides of October, all.

_Let each man render me his bloody hand.  
_ Act III, Scene 1

* * *

The first rehearsal the gloves appeared, Sade nearly vomited.

Hannah was obviously disappointed, as she always was when the momentum of a rehearsal was broken; her outstretched hand fell limply to her side, and an impatient sigh huffed from out her nostrils. But no one knew exactly what Hannah was in for, and perhaps she didn't know how it _actually_ felt to have her hands covered in someone else's blood.

Sade, for her part, did.

When the woman from Outside who was teaching them the play first arrived, they'd talked a lot about themselves. Not many people shared what they'd done, or what they'd been through, but they all talked about how they _felt_ about certain things. Sade had barely opened her mouth, but when they passed around copies of the play and assigned random roles for a read-through, her hands had trembled when they reached the assassination scene. The woman from Outside noticed, and after the read-through, she'd asked Sade if she wanted to talk. Sade shook her head no; back in those days, she was barely able to string three words together when anyone asked her a question. The woman from Outside looked at Sade seriously and then asked her if she'd prefer not to be cast as one of the conspirators. Sade, downcast and miserable as a soaked kitten, nodded.

And so she'd been cast as Mark Antony— _Mark Antony_ , who never bloody _stopped_ talking! Sade was thrilled and also completely terrified, and it took her a solid three rehearsals before she could read the unfamiliar language of her lines aloud without stammering.

But, most of all, she was relieved that she could leave the room whenever they started rehearsing the assassination scene.

The red rubber really looked nothing like blood, but that wasn't the point. Sade remembered how it had felt to have that _colour_ staining her hands. Did any of them actually _know_ , the way that skin and muscle resisted the point of a knife? Did any of them know, how it felt when the handle of the knife grew slippery with warm, salty liquid that throbbed from of the wound in the rhythm of a heartbeat? _Incitement._ That was the term used by the woman from Outside, for what Mark Antony did to the Romans. Sade turned the phrase over in her mind as she lay on her spartan metal bunk the night after the term had first come up in rehearsal. _Incitement_. It was also the word that her barrister had used at her hearing. _She was incited to self-defence by the credible threats of her partner, My Lord._ It meant being provoked into doing murderous, bloody deeds because you thought—you _knew_ —that killing was more just than taking the shit they threw at you.

(Her partner too had always claimed that she provoked his attacks with her words. Which was why she stopped talking altogether, until they filled her mouth with Shakespeare and urged her to sing.)

"Antony's a bit of a lad," said the woman from Outside one day, during a break in rehearsal. "I know you've got it deep down within you, Sade, but why don't we do something physical to help you embody the roguish side of the character a bit? Ever thought of dyeing your hair?"

Sade hadn't, but she grinned and nodded her consent. The other girls shrieked and giggled as they helped her bleach her hair and then dye it a dark red that pooled in the white ceramic sink like blood. Staring back at her own reflection, Sade saw not her usual silent, scared face, but someone with a corona of scarlet who sure as fuck would let slip the dogs of war when prompted. She stood just a touch straighter. And at the next rehearsal, her voice was just a touch louder.

By the final rehearsal, Sade wasn't afraid of the gloves anymore. Nor was she scared of the circle of guns pointed at her prone body, even though the first time they'd staged it, she'd curled up into a ball on the floor, images flashing through her mind of all the times he'd held a gun to her head in the past. Her voice had crescendoed over the course of the past few weeks, and when she shouted, everyone fell silent. And when they did, she could believe that she was Mark Antony, beloved of Caesar, a co-inheritor of the three-fold world. Mark Antony, shrewd conniver and little shit that he was, negotiated artfully and cut deals behind the scenes and wasn't afraid to spill blood when hurt too deeply by those he'd trusted as friends. Mark Antony wasn't gonna take it lying down when his noble Caesar had been stabbed to death. And in Shakespeare's world, that was forgivable.

After all, the law isn't always just, and justice isn't always lawful. Sade, her scarlet mane blazing under the lights, looked out at the hoodied throng of listeners hanging on her every word, and she roared.


	2. Portia / Octavius Caesar

_Dwell I but in the suburbs /_ _Of your good pleasure?_  
Act II, Scene 1

* * *

There was a new bruise under her eye, this one from a fight with one of the girls in the showers over a bar of soap. But the truth was that there had been a bruise under that eye for most of her life. First her dad, then one boyfriend, then the next and the next. It might as well have been a permanent birthmark, at this point.

Still, she was sorry that it would be there on the night of the play. Because within the play, she would never have gotten a black eye. Well, in fairness, Octavius Caesar might; but he was a warrior, he'd have gotten it from a piece of shrapnel, or in hand-to-hand combat against a fellow soldier. Octavius Caesar didn't get hit by people who were bigger than him, because in the end, he was the one in the centre of the court, he was the one in front of the camera. Octavius Caesar had _power_ , and people couldn't take their eyes off him.

Not like her, who had spent her whole life watching people avert their gaze in shame or disgust over the bruises and the cuts.

Octavius Caesar was, in the end, a brute who killed for sport, a man who discarded people from existence as casually as most people tossed their rubbish in the bin. She much preferred Portia, the man's mind trapped in a woman's might, bursting with potential and on the brink of madness at what little leeway society gave her to realise it. Yeah, she understood Portia, down to the CD cracked in two, because hadn't she also resorted to such measures once, hoping and hoping to make herself feel something again, after she'd started numbing herself to all of the blows? "I don't get Portia," Sade told her once as they scarfed down the inedible prison food during one dinner after rehearsal. But what was there not to get? Cut your leg, steal a car, stage a play; in the end, it was all a cry for help, wasn't it, a desperate plea for the world to pay enough attention to care?

What she didn't understand instinctively about Portia—what she had to learn for the role—was what it meant to be touched gently, the way that Brutus touched her. She'd never forget the first rehearsal that they'd felt comfortable enough to "really commit to the 'beat' with the CD" (in the words of the woman who came in from Outside to help them learn the play). She'd pretended to gash her leg, and Brutus had thrown himself to the floor, taken her in his arms, comforted her as she sobbed tears too genuine to stop when the scene ended. When was the last time anyone had ever held her like that? She wasn't used to feeling so _safe_ , like the arms around her were there to shield her, never threatening to turn against her if she misstepped. _Maybe_ , she thought, _just maybe, this is how it feels to be loved the right way._

But of course, it only existed within the play. The moment the scene ended, Brutus always turned back into Hannah, scowling, moody, foul-mouthed Hannah; and there was little chance of safety there, if she'd even had the guts to ask for it. "That's just acting, isn't it," Sade shrugged when she tried to explain, "and shit, Hannah's bloody good at it!" Still. Even if it all was pretence, there had to be a kernel of truth in how it felt to be Portia, being loved by Brutus. Maybe, beyond the prison bars, there was a chance she'd be able to find the same feeling again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And yes, I now am well aware that Clare Dunne has a lovely birthmark under her left eye. But I didn't know that when I was watching the production the first time around, so I assumed that the makeup artist had chosen to give the meta character a black eye, until I started looking up the cast after I finished the play. And that faulty assumption sort of worked its way into how I envisioned the meta character as a whole.


	3. Casca

_So every bondman in his own hand bears / The power to cancel his captivity.  
_Act I, Scene 2

* * *

They never used the right pronouns, the fucking guards. Yeah, they'd call him 'Alexander' because he'd made sure it was on his fucking birth certificate; but there still was the whole fact of his being in a fucking women's prison now, wasn't there? "It's for your own safety, you know," the guards insisted, "you think this place is shite, you should see what'd happen to someone like you in a men's prison." Like he didn't already know. Like it wouldn't happen even if he'd been born a bloody man, in the first place.

What Alexander liked about Casca was that he didn't suffer fools. When Brutus and Cassius stopped Casca to recruit him for their plot, he all but told them to piss off, and Alexander liked that. The woman from Outside who'd come to help them with the Shakespeare pointed out to Alexander that, of all the Senators, Casca was the one who walked onstage and spoke in plain language, not in verse. A blunt man of the people. The sort of bloke you'd meet at the pub and never guess he was a Senator. Casca, unlike literally everyone else in this play, was _authentic_.

Casca also was a man of action, and Alexander liked that, too. He told himself that he'd be the first one to stab Caesar, too, if given the chance. Fucking authoritarians, always trying to say what's right or wrong. Insisting that people like Alexander were actually women, or that they didn't exist in the first place. Alexander knew what those shites in their palaces around the world were doing to people like him, law after bloody law; and so he took his hormones with as much gratitude as an inmate could ever muster for the fucking powers-that-were, and every rehearsal as he raised his knife, he consoled himself with the thought that their lofty scene would be acted over, and over, and over, and over, in states unborn and accents yet unknown.

Some of the girls at the prison had decided not to do the play because they thought it was too dark and bloody. Fuck them. The darkness of Shakespeare was nowhere near some of the places that Alexander had been. On those days when he felt like the universe was trying to erase him, he'd had his moments of thinking that maybe he should help the process along its way, stood by his bathtub with a razor in hand. Always been too cowardly, of course, the same way he'd been too cowardly to mount a proper defence when the fuckers who'd nearly choked him to death in an alleyway one night, turned the tables and alleged they'd done it in self-defence because Alexander had gotten a few solid punches in before they'd gotten their arms around his neck. (Alexander didn't trust the police, and he'd be damned if he ever met a trans person who truly did; they'd have found some way to make it his fault, even if he'd had the means to hire the best fucking barrister in the country.) Some days, he wondered if this prison was his punishment for being too cowardly to free himself from the fucking misery of his own existence. And that was when the voices always started in, that he lacked the balls to be a man in any sense, that he was always going to be Alexandra and it was the name they'd carve on his tombstone, that he would die in this fucking women's prison and they'd write him off as just another misgendered statistic in their records. _You can't even cut your own throat; why the fuck would you ever be able to stab a Caesar?_

And yet. And yet, rehearsal after rehearsal, that was what Casca did. That was what _Alexander_ got to do. He knew as well as anyone else that it wasn't _real_ , but god, after all of the power that society had taken away from him, it felt really fucking good to take just a tiny sliver of it back.

Alexander would never really admit it to anyone else, but the show had its high points on a purely personal level, as well. As he exited the stage with his red-gloved hands raised in the air, smiling vindictively, he heard a girl seated near the aisle whisper to her friend, "Ooh, that smile's _dangerous_ , wouldn't want to cross him on a dark night." He knew that she might have meant Casca, not Alexander—but in that moment, weren't they one and the same? _Well, fuck_ , Alexander realised, flicking the tip of his flimsy prop knife backstage, _everyone in this audience is looking at me and seeing a man._ It may not have been real, but it was a start. Maybe this meant that even after the play ended, the guards would finally be able to see him as a man even without the Shakespeare, and they'd start using the correct fucking pronouns, for once.


	4. Cinna the Poet / Lepidus

_And things unlucky charge my fantasy.  
_ Act III, Scene 3

* * *

"Jesus, I'm so sorry, Rachelle," they all said the day after the play, because they'd had to lock up before the play had even bloody ended and no one could apologise while the guards were watching. "We'd rehearsed the fights with Alexander, we didn't know how to do them with you, things just got rougher than we'd expected, right?"

Yeah, right! This is why she hadn't fucking _wanted_ to be an actor in all of this! She'd said she'd be Lepidus because he was only in one scene and had about four lines; and she only agreed to do _any_ of it because they told her that if the other guitarists were also gonna play roles, then she'd have to as well. Rachelle knew her strengths, and they lay in playing the drums, which was all she really wanted to do in the play; she'd always liked music, always sung loudest in the church choir, always had quiet ambitions to try out for _Britain's Got Talent_ or something like that. Could've done well, too, maybe. She'd never know now, probably, not since she and her friends made the stupid, stupid mistake of drinking far too much one night and then trying to shoplift posh dresses from Harrods. Did they let former convicts compete on _Britain's Got Talent_? She'd have to wait to find out.

Rachelle's nose was still tender, and she didn't want the empty apologies of all of the other girls. So instead she went and said goodbye to her drum set, which they were returning to the shop that had lent it to them with funding from some charity or another. It was nicer than anything she'd have been able to buy for herself, not unless she saved up for years. They'd taken the drumsticks away already, and that probably wasn't too surprising; they'd always supervised her while she practised, probably were afraid that she'd smuggle the drumsticks out and the inmates would use them as weapons or something equally ridiculous. Didn't they recognise that Rachelle wasn't the type to do something like that? Didn't they realise that, ninety-nine percent of the time, _none_ of them were—that they, like Cinna the Poet, were humans with quite human flaws (bad verses, no money) who were unlucky enough to have gotten caught up in a terrifyingly violent and violative system, and were still paying a disproportionate price for it?

Rachelle flicked a cymbal with her nail and listened to the satisfying spit of the metal. She had spent most of her time in prison being as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. Sitting behind these drums, sticks in hand, making as much noise as possible with everyone's permission and _approval_ —well, it'd pretty much saved her goddamn soul. And being in the play, proving she was worth knowing because she could play the drums, it all _had_ given her some new friends, which she appreciated, even if they did sometimes shove her against the wall so hard that she bloodied her nose in front of an entire audience. Rachelle couldn't help but smile. God, she hated this place, and she couldn't wait to get out and back into the comparative sanity of the real world. But she was gonna need something to help her mend bridges and rebuild her life and stay strong even when everything was going to shit. Provided she kept the noise down after hours, a set of drums didn't seem like the worst idea in the world.


	5. Cassius

_He reads much; / He is a great observer and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men._  
Act I, Scene 2

* * *

She'd always been shit at convincing people of things. Couldn't talk her baby sister out of marrying that motherfucker who robbed her blind and disappeared into the night; couldn't talk her boss into giving her the promotion to management that she had so clearly deserved for years. Wasn't too surprising, then, that that was how she'd ended up in this god-awful prison, in the first place—that she was here because she hadn't been able to convince the police that she hadn't even _known_ about the bag of marijuana that they'd found in the boot of her brother's car. And she really hadn't, honest to god; maybe she should have known better than to trust that her brother's car would be clean when he lent it to her, but for fuck's sake, it _wasn't_ her pot! Not that she ever expected the police to believe her. Black woman, big hair, too defensive and loud when they searched the car and cuffed her—she was fucked from the start, but that didn't stop her from crumbling inside as she heard the sentence pronounced.

She arrived in prison half-convinced that she was going to be shanked before the week was out. Somehow, though, the other inmates in the prison didn't seem to mind her. She was polite when talked to, cleaned up after herself, and stayed out of the occasional drama that flared across the prison like an oil spill catching fire. Her brother, in a fit of guilt, had taken to sending her packages every month that she received searched and disorganised, but which provided her with quality chocolates that she shared with the other girls (she was rubbish at the whole bartering system that occurred behind the guards' backs, cigarettes and weed and such, and it was easiest to just share and stay in everyone's good graces that way). The packages also always contained a couple of whatever completely frivolous paperbacks her brother could find in the second-hand bookshops that she loved to frequent in her normal life: ridiculous sci-fi adventures from the seventies with hand-drawn illustrations of the heroes on the covers, smutty romance novels with provocative titles that certain authors churned out at a truly alarming rate, trashy murder mysteries with predictable plots and laughably hard-boiled detectives (which were secretly her favourites). She loved sticking her nose between the pages and breathing in that wonderful smell of yellowed wood pulp that's so characteristic of paperbacks worn a soft white around the corners of the cover.

She started lending her books out, too, although she retained the policy of getting to read each of them first, just in case there were any too precious to risk losing forever. The girls, in turn, started referring to her as 'The Librarian'. Most of them just wanted the romance novels and the gossip magazines that snuck their way into the occasional package, but a few were more adventurous. She'd have pegged Alexander as a murder mystery type, but he began slowly working his way through her sci-fi collection, instead ("You're fucking daft if you think I didn't want to be a space pirate fighting aliens when I was a kid," he explained with a snort). Rachelle, unexpectedly, was the one who really coveted her murder mysteries ("I like seeing if I'm smart enough to figure out who done it, before I reach the end, you know?"). Even Hannah hesitantly approached her one day and asked if she could borrow a book, any book; and she'd placed in her hands the one serious novel that her brother had sent her, some postmodern classic that she simply didn't have the patience or energy to enjoy fully, while locked up. And, for some reason, closed-off and hardened as Hannah was, the book cast over her that sort of soft look that people get when they're transported away by a story.

She'd been just a tiny bit offended when she was cast as Cassius. All the other inmates teased her for it, of course, because wasn't it a laugh that the _nicest_ and most _generous_ girl in the prison should be cast as the villain with the itching palm? The woman from Outside clearly had a nose for sniffing out her actors' disappointment, for after rehearsal, she explained that it was too easy to make Cassius a bitter, jealous opportunist; that it would be much more interesting if she could bring to life a Cassius whose core republican idealism shone through the manipulations. Cassius would flatter, and Cassius would lie, and Cassius would even kill; but in his heart, it was all for the good of Rome. It took her a while to warm to this interpretation of her role, but after all, if Cassius had solely personal ambitions, why would he spend so much time promoting Brutus (a far greater opportunist hiding behind a far thicker veneer of idealism)? Yes, she decided, Cassius was a dedicated revolutionary republican, for whom the ends would justify any number of distasteful means.

"I feel sorry for Cassius, in the end," Rachelle told her one evening as she returned one of the murder mysteries. (Rachelle was always so good about avoiding dripping water on the pages, or tearing the covers, or even turning the corners of pages down to keep her place.) "He threw everything away on a gamble that Brutus would be able to keep things in order after Caesar was dead, and he dies seeing Rome being torn apart in front of him, when all he wanted was for Rome to be free."

And she too felt sorry for Cassius, who knew how to orate the revolution but not how to fight it, whose silver tongue was drowned out by the drums of war. Cassius could convince anyone of anything, and yet he died on his birthday, alone except for his slave boy (bound to obedience, no convincing necessary). She too had run up against systems of violence that drowned out any logic or flattery or reason that might have saved her. But somehow, she was doing better than the lean and hungry Cassius. Somehow, even though she had lacked the eloquence that Shakespeare had lent his conspiratorial Senator, she had managed to convince virtually everyone in the prison to like her, their resident Librarian. And that somehow made her feel like, one day, after, everything might still be okay.


	6. Julius Caesar

_That unassailable holds on his rank, / Unshak'd of motion.  
_ Act III, Scene 1

* * *

The irony was that she was one of the most invisible people at the prison. Everyone knew to give her a wide berth, of course, the big, silent dyke with her eyes always turned towards the floor. But her safety lay in her silent invisibility, before the play. When most people barely remembered that she existed in the first place, few were going to pick fights, especially when she was a wild card and no one could quite tell how hard she really could hit.

And that was fine with her, really. She'd always hated being looked at, the stocky kid who looked like a boy but had big tits, the girl who tried putting on makeup only to make it all run with tears because her reflection was telling her that she was never gonna be able to hide what she was. She'd grown up butch in a tiny village where the term didn't even exist, constantly bullied, regarded with no small distaste by even her own family. Finally, she'd run away, only to endure the leers of the pimps and the johns to whom she turned when she had no other options. She hated letting the men touch her, watched their disgust and fascination at the odd androgyne they'd purchased for the hour, more often than not stumbled away from the encounter with bruises pooling beneath the surface of her skin. The only thing that kept her sane was the comfort she found in one of her fellow whores, when the long nights were finally over and they could hold each other close and softly kiss each other's bruises.

She'd thought she'd left that life behind, when she'd finally managed to get away from the whole shitty system, lied her way into a job driving lorries around the country. It suited her fine for years and years, staying on her own behind a wheel, away from all the stares. But the drives were fucking long, and she had to keep awake at night somehow, and coffee and those rubbish energy drinks only went so far. They'd stopped her for the speeding and arrested her for the meth. And it wasn't new, being back in a holding cell, not after all the times she'd ended up here in the old days.

She'd planned to serve her time as invisibly as possible, hiding in plain sight until they shoved her back out into the real world and she had to figure out what she was gonna do next. The play changed that. The woman from Outside who was trying to make them all understand Shakespeare opined that there was a "quiet power lurking beneath of the surface" of her silence, and she sure as hell didn't know what that meant, but it was far nicer to be described as powerfully silent than anything else she'd even been called, so she'd take it. Even if all she wanted was to be left alone and forgotten by all of the other inmates and all of the guards and all of the people who could possibly hurt her.

The next thing she knew, they'd cast her as the fucking title character.

There had to be some mistake. Quiet power or no, she was _not_ a Caesar. Caesar was noble, Caesar had the polish of a politician! Not so fast, said the woman from Outside; Caesar had led armies, but Caesar was a street fighter, at heart. And, when the woman from Outside asked, yes, she nodded, she knew how bullies acted, she knew what sorts of shitty things they did to people, simply because they could. It was her idea to have Caesar shove the doughnut into Cassius's mouth; her idea to have Caesar throw Calpurnia to the ground. She understood the brutality of Caesar's world, the crash of metal on metal, the gladiatorial circus. She could bring the cruelty to Caesar that was required. She liked the idea of bullies meeting horrible ends, and Caesar's fate had been sealed long before she had any say in it.

What she couldn't bring to the role was a sense of power, having never known how it tasted. The woman from Outside decided to change that. One day, in rehearsal, everyone had to stop where they were, and she had to stand in the middle of them and not move a muscle for five minutes straight. The woman from Outside arranged her: shoulders back, feet apart, chin tilted defiantly up. God, it was excruciating, staring straight ahead, _feeling_ all of the eyes on her as she breathed in and out, in and out. "Look at me," ordered the woman from Outside, daring her not to run and hide for once; and she'd somehow resisted turning her gaze away even as she squirmed internally, desperate to collapse into herself and become invisible again. But, when the discomfort had settled, the awkwardness faded. She stared; and she felt the stares of all of the other inmates on her; and the woman from Outside stared back; and for five minutes, everything was tense and utterly silent. And, when the mobile alarm chimed to say that the five minutes were up, everyone burst into applause.

It wasn't like the change happened overnight. At meals, she still kept her gaze turned downwards mostly, only looked up when directly addressed to offer a response. But after that rehearsal, the stares that followed her were no longer stares of derision or scepticism. "You should've seen her, she was like a statue of a god," she overheard one woman say to another behind her back; and when she turned, the woman who had spoken froze in something almost like awe, until she quirked a tiny half-smile and the woman relaxed. And slowly, she grew accustomed to being seen; slowly, she stopped actively trying to be invisible, enough to make a few friends, although cautiously enough to avoid making any enemies.

The day she knew she had changed was the day the woman from Outside told her to stand on a table and shout her name at her followers; and she did it, without hesitation, and her followers shouted her name back. And it didn't _feel_ like acting, it didn't _feel_ like anyone needed to pretend. Sure, there were still moments in the play that felt real but definitely weren't: the scenes where Caesar hurt those around him (she always apologised after rehearsal, always, even though the women weren't actually hurt and said it was fine); the moment at the beginning of the play where the woman from Outside and sweet little Sade had decided Mark Antony should kiss Caesar (and Jesus, was it a pity that those kisses were all pretend!); the scene where they forced a litre of bleach down her throat and stabbed her one by one (and if she flinched, it was because she'd felt the point of a knife against her skin before). But these moments, where she raised her arms above her head and felt excitement crackle around the ensemble like electricity? She drank in their gazes, converting their attention into power, raw and coursing through her as she bared herself to the scrutiny of the world. And, with a confident sneer towards her followers, she dared them to even try and look away.


	7. Brutus

_A piece of work that will make sick men whole.  
_ Act II, Scene 1

* * *

There wasn't much point anymore in trying to make friends in the prison. Not when so many of the women were so young. Not when they all would leave before she would. Because that was what they hadn't told Hannah before they'd hauled her off to prison for life. Human connection had always been transient, that much was clear. But inmates never came back to visit friends still in prison. Now that everyone on the Outside had forgotten Hannah, she didn't see why she should bother forging a new set of friendships that would inevitably betray her just as deeply.

Everyone liked the Librarian when they brought her in, though. The woman was clearly oblivious to the politics of the prison, and she shared her books indiscriminately. Hannah stayed away from the rest of the prison community on principle—a good way to avoid attachments, both positive and negative—but even she couldn't resist asking the Librarian if she could borrow a book. The Librarian, perhaps in deference to Hannah's age, gave her something serious, something that took Hannah a good week to finally pick up and read because it was so nonsensical. Once she'd finally puzzled it out, though, Hannah couldn't stop reading and then re-reading. It was a book about everything and nothing, a book that was written almost a century prior but captured the eternal essence of the streets and parks of London on a sunny day in June. Hannah had never particularly liked reading, but this book took her breath away. It was the closest she'd ever come in this life to once more hearing Big Ben toll the hour. She roamed Westminster through Virginia Woolf's eyes in the hours before bed and dreamt that she flew above the streets of London on wings.

Hannah had never known much about art, had never cared much about art. But if a book might send her beyond the walls of the prison, then how much more so a play! She volunteered for the project as soon as she heard of its existence, not caring what the younger women thought of her. Hannah had held herself back from others for so long that she felt almost suffocated by the sheer number of people around her in the room where they first read the script. But god, the story, the language, the characters! She'd be damned if she understood half of what was being said, but it was like her Woolf in that the impression was perhaps more important than the precise words themselves. For two hours, Hannah sat entranced, not caring that her fellow inmates were not actors, not caring that they stumbled over the Latin names and Elizabethan phrases. For these two precious hours, she got to visit the Roman Forum, Sardis, the plains of Philippi. She got to feel like something larger than herself, something larger than the seething microcosm of the prison could ever provide.

And they would have an _audience_. Hannah still drew breath, but just as the emperors of old had exiled the irredeemable into the wilderness, she was exiled forever from the rest of the civilised world; was, for all goods and purposes, civilly dead in the eyes of the law and in the memory of society. But now, for just one evening, she'd exist again, she'd be seen and remembered by someone— _anyone_ —outside the walls of the prison. In bringing Brutus to life, for a few short hours, she'd finally get to live again.

Hannah hurled herself into rehearsals with more passion and commitment than the rest of the cast combined. The other inmates, who had always viewed her with a mixture of trepidation and pity, soon learned that Hannah was equally capable of inspiring awe and respect. And why wouldn't she give this project everything she had? The other inmates all had lives to return to, after their periods of exile ended. Hannah's life had been cut off in the middle, left incomplete. She'd never get the chance to go back and finish the things that she had left behind (fostering friendships, raising her kids, working, voting, _contributing_ to the pattern of history, in her own small way). This was the only thing of value that she might ever have the opportunity to create and complete, and not fuck up along the way. She seized it and dug in her nails, clinging to it with a fierce, proud, desperate intensity.

In the days before the performance, Hannah's stomach began to twist itself into knots, because with the performance, the play would end, and her life—filled of late with colours and music and camaraderie and _purpose_ —would go back to its gray, lonely, beauty-starved existence. _If only it would go on and on forever_ , she thought desperately, _if only it would never end_. But of course the play never _did_ end, and that was so much worse. Her last chance at finishing something of meaning was gone. They'd stolen it from her, just as they'd stolen her youth and her community and her goddamn humanity. _So are they all, all honourable_ _men_ , she thought, dazedly noting the crushed expressions of her fellow inmates, the pretend-noble Romans from whom all dignity and honour had been stripped long before this last, most unkindest cut of all.

Hannah was never the most sociable person, but in the days after the play, she became somehow even more withdrawn, lay on her bed for hours at a time, as if what little life was left in her had drained away in her grief over the aborted finish. The erstwhile thespians murmured amongst themselves, wondering if they should try to help; but eventually, reluctantly, they decided against. Hannah who had been Brutus was their comrade, their friend, the noblest Roman of them all. Hannah the inmate, the woman condemned to a living death with a whole life order, was a stranger.

Somehow, throughout the prison, life—if it could be called that—went on. Hannah ate and moved without truly experiencing any of it, a somehow deadened version of the automaton that she had been for the past several decades. And then, one day, a package arrived; not for the Librarian, for once, but for Hannah, whose bewilderment finally demanded some sense of engagement with the world again. Who would send _her_ a package? Her friends and her kids, she was quite sure, had forgotten about her altogether; if by some miracle they hadn't, there was no reason they should set aside their shame and disgust at this late date. Her heart pounding, she sat down on her bunk and opened the package—which, curiously enough, was unopened and bore no address, as if it had been dropped off by hand and not sent through the post.

It was a book, a thick book, with small print in neat columns and an etching of William Shakespeare embossed on the cover in gold. _The Complete Works_ , proclaimed the title. Hannah sat back, stunned, feeling as if she had just opened the lid of a treasure chest. Here were enough stories to sustain her; here was enough beauty to help her carry on, when she had so very little left to keep living for.

A slip of paper was shoved between two pages like a bookmark, and Hannah opened to where the paper was set. It was a note, from the woman from Outside, saying that she missed the entire cast very much and that she wanted Hannah to have this, as a thank you for their time together. She had written out a list of plays that she thought Hannah might enjoy, but she recommended starting with the play she'd bookmarked. Hannah put the slip of paper aside and began to read; and the hours flew by as she read and re-read and sometimes laughed a quiet little laugh to herself. The last lines of the epilogue blurred as Hannah's eyes filled with tears:

 _As you from crimes would pardon'd be,_  
 _Let your indulgence set me free_.

Hannah closed the book and placed it carefully under her pillow. She might share it with the others, later, but for now, she wanted to keep all to herself the fact that someone had remembered her, someone had cared enough to send her a tome of soul-nourishing verse. Then she noticed the slip of paper, which she had left off reading in the middle, once advised to start the play. She turned the paper over and clapped her hand to her mouth to keep from crying out with excitement and wonder and hope at the postscript there:

_P.S. You might want to learn Prospero's lines. They may come in handy, in the future._

And that night, Hannah once more dreamt of having wings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of this last vignette is, of course, an allusion to the existence of the rest of the Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy. I know that Jade Anouka's in-character introduction at the beginning of the 2017 production refers to this play being the first of a trilogy; but I definitely feel like the ending of the production of _Caesar_ still retains the sense that this is a one-off event, so I've chosen to keep those heightened stakes. I also haven't seen _Henry IV_ or _The Tempest_ yet, but I'm watching them soon and I simply cannot wait.
> 
> UPDATE: Oh wow, I have now watched the other two plays in this trilogy, and given that my headcanons for Hannah apparently aligned very precisely with Harriet Walter's, I unsurprisingly had *so many feelings* about that extremely poignant and painful final scene in _The Tempest_ , dear lord.


End file.
